We Compare a $100 DTC Funnel vs a $100M DTC Funnel

Cody goes deep on winks adjustments. The brand is four weeks in. So we're hitting both sides of the spectrum.

Multi-hundred millions of dollars of brands and Cody's doing a couple orders a day, which we're all super excited about. We end the episode talking about generalized advice for how can you iterate or improve or accelerate your new funnels, which is obviously the lifeblood of any D to C brand. So thank you for listening. Let's get into it. Connor Rowland's going to walk us through sort of step by step. Some of the new hex-clad funnels that are scaling this year. We're going to start with Cody. We tore apart the winks funnel a couple weeks ago with

“Baroon from after so, which was super fun. It's been winks is basically twice as old since that episode. So give us give us a status update. Where's your time been?”

What are some of the learnings? Yeah, you know, I know that for ages up 50% year over year. I just want to say since that episode maybe three weeks ago two weeks ago.

We're up like a thousand percent. So it's not a comparison, but if I sum up the feedback in three areas, obviously offer is really important.

And with us being a new brand without a lot of credibility, you know, the feedback was like why am I going to spend the money on this, right? Like we weren't doing a good job showing the value. So you can do a few things. You can obviously add a lot of social proof. You can make it the offer better and go cheaper, you know, on it discount whatever it is, but you can also educate and provide more value, which is part of a thing we're trying to do. So we're working on a scientific advisory panel right now to get, you know, to get, you know, doctors and get more credibility.

We are obviously doing a better job. The feedback was like yes, you have these ingredients. I don't know anything about them. So we built out a big ingredient grid that actually links to like the clinical claims because people in this space one learning is like they actually really do want ingredients. Like I'm so usually like top of Final Market or I'm like hey, no one cares about ingredients. They want problems. They want benefits. But like when people get to site, they actually very much do want to know what's in it and why those were chosen, especially to help us with with the, you know, the price point.

And then from a design perspective, like where I was going away from kids and stuff, but the branding is still very playful and we'll probably do a fuller like rebrand packaging right, so many brands do like, you know, to kind of try to upscale it. And I think that's our learning. It's like our, we have a mismatch between our product, which is actually very premium. It's got three clinical ingredients. The cogs are not cheap. Like the guys took, took no shortcuts there, but our branding doesn't, nothing better marketing shows that. So now it's just like what can we do. So I at least like change like the look and feel of our website.

Quite a bit, so I'll just, I'll share my screen and show it real quick. Is this the home page that we're looking at? Yeah, this is home page. Okay, so for those listening, I'll, I'll talk to you quickly because if you check out getwinks.com, um, I don't know, last week, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, it was extremely playful. Do you guys have a name for the mascot? I don't know if we do. Do you need a name for the mascot? That's number one. I'm trying to get rid of the mascot. I'm trying to get rid of it. Well,

if it had a name, maybe it would be working. Like you got it, you got to, you got to fully like anthropomorphize the mascot. Yeah. Um, like, dude, you remember grimace shakes at McDonald's? I mean, like that doesn't happen without grimace the name.

“That's what you should be going for. If you looked at the site two, three weeks ago, it was like, it almost like a illustrated like children's book.”

It was very cute and the branding was like really well done. This what we're looking at now far more elevated. There's white backgrounds. There's more text. It's just like far more premium of a feel. The mascot has been ridiculed to a ridiculed, subjugated to a much like smaller part of the site, which I think relegated. Thank you. Um, I don't know. I might be the source with me. Um, relegated to a much more unimportant part of the site. So I think that's probably good for conversion and optimization.

Oh, it's good. So let me ask you this. Um, are you AB testing this or are you still in the phase of like your sort of, you know, ingesting anecdotal information from people making gut decisions and just kind of like seeing what these changes result in on like a day over a day week of a week basis? Yeah, we did. We didn't test this. We'll probably get to the point too. And we're well, but just trying to get our traffic up a little bit higher and, you know, this was just making a bunch of big changes at once that we thought were right.

So it was, there was a lot at once, definitely not a scientific way to do it, but uh, no, no AB test yet. Are you just looking at like conversion rate in CAAC then to to really back into whether or not this new experience is is performing better than the previous one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're looking at that. Obviously looking at like a closper at a car, you know, we're just looking at how many orders we get coming in

“and is it more than we have before or less? Yep. I love, I think personally like my biggest thing when you”

guys first launched was like, I wanted to know more about the ingredients like because I think that's what

my Latone in, but I felt like the narrative stopped there and I was like, okay, well, what is it using?

And I love how how much more ingredient forward you guys are being now like I really like this this 10 ingredient packed in one nightly drink with the pop outs. I think that's like, it's really helpful for me to understand and like a lot of the I recognize a lot of these ingredients and like I trust this product more just based on on this section. I think this is this is really cool. I appreciate that. Yeah, that was that was that was very consistent with the feedback. Some of it was even like, I don't even know what it is.

Like I know that you're talking about sleep. I know there's talking about no melatonin, but like some people, a lot of people know but some people like why is that even bad? I take it and then some are like, okay, if it's not melatonin, what is in it? And also even like, is it a drink?

“People couldn't even tell if it was a drink. So obviously, that's why we got the image in there.”

So yeah, I appreciate that. You know, just trying to make it skimble. This is one thing we're working on that we don't quite have yet, but I think it got missed the beginning. It's like, it's like pain is a lot easier to sell them prevention, but like some brands do a good job. Like I am eight does, age you one does is like they're not fixing like an immediate problem. You're kind of selling a little bit of a lifestyle. And so, you know, our co-founder Curtis, who's like the vision

of the product I like has this belief, like, better sleep is just worth investing in for like your health and everything else, you know? And so we're trying to kind of take some steps to to test how that messaging plays and showing just like, hey, like, worse sleep is or better sleep is, you know, has all of these longer term effects. I don't know how it's going to do, but it's definitely something from like a positioning side where we're starting to kind of take that

direction as well. So the other thing, so in the spirit of like talking about the full funnel, this makes total sense. We designed the website to be more premium, be more elevated, be more educational. How has this affected like the ads that you're developing? And also I'm curious how the ways in which you're producing those ads have changed over the last, you know, in the course

of the first six weeks of the brand. Yeah, so what we're finding the most successful, I would say,

like, you know, we don't have a ton of winners. We definitely have like two things that are rising to the crowd. Number one is partnership ads, and I'll show you one. We've really just got one of our first ones in. And I mean, that's more like partnership ads with like an influencer, larger influencer, instead of like a, you know, small tribe creator. But it's, it's doing really well. It's definitely getting a lot of spend definitely has the best metrics on it. You know, not obviously profitable yet,

but like definitely like really strong signs of that. So we're going to do a hell of a lot more

“partnership ads. I think, you know, like instant hydration did from the beginning. Like it can be just”

like a great way to get credibility when nobody knows about you. All right, like just obviously clear, you know, influencer marketing. And then be like strong signal to meta. And then I also think we're going to test diversified personas and so it'll be some testing. Like we're, we're also going to go some of the feedback we got on this stuff was like, hey, it looks very, you know, feminine, but like I'm a guy and I can't sleep either. And this is interesting. I think I said it in the last part,

but like we're like 60, 40 mail to feed Mel right now. I think a lot of that is obviously because of our ex audience and stuff. But even our meta spend is is more mail. So like, I don't know. Like that, that we're going to say and like really trying to still figure out who the customer is and what the messaging is. But so partnership ads do in really well. And then we're going to start making more of them. But like the AI animated stuff is actually doing pretty well. The, you know,

the songs that people are talking about. Like those are doing pretty well. And I think we just have to test more scripts with them. Cody, can I ask a question about, about like the persona stuff

“because you guys started off like very specifically positioned. Like you were, I think if I remember”

correctly, it was like, if you're a woman 40 plus with kids, like this is the product for you, you guys have clearly like pulled back from that a little bit and in reposition to be a little bit more like ingredient forward. And you're kind of seeing who's resonating without like assuming who the, who the audience is going to be. So like obviously like some stuff about the package right is still positioned that way. Like you're at that time bestie. That's clearly positioned for like

a female in the like, you know, 30 to 40 range I think. So do you, do you anticipate, like you're kind of pulling back from that a little bit? Like you said, you're, you're finding out that your

demos may be a little different than it was originally positioned for. Do you think you'll ultimately

like reposition it for a very specific person at some point once you have more data on like who that, who that core buyer is? And kind of also like once you guys get through the like, for the personal network buyers, right? Because obviously that's going to skew things and you kind of need to see like what's the organic demo? Like do you anticipate you guys almost repositioning it for a specific person again with that data? And I would say I don't know. Like it could go in

one direction where like our cool, this is our customer, right? It's, it is this 40 year old mom.

right? Or the, or it's, we'll go more general. We actually think that this is a union sex product, which is great. Like that's probably better larger term, right? Like I struggle with sleep. Like there's no reason that, you know, I can't, maybe it ditches down to like my hunch is, it niches down into a little bit more of like a, actually like longevity, like health optimized, like a little bit more like serious and sciencey and a little bit more of like premium, right? Like we have to

go like less playful, more premium, but a little bit more like general there. And then we can have funnels that are talking about the specific problems. That would be my, my guess, my hypothesis.

But we're really using this inventory we have for our first PO to test. And so that's part of

the goal with the partnership ads. It's like we're going to test some, you know, male health and wellness guys. We're going to test doctors. We're going to test the pairing menopause angle. Like we're going to test a lot of this because yeah, we're right now we like really don't know. I don't think we, I don't know, sometimes it's easy to be like, and I've talked to people like this, like, this is our customer, and obviously everything is about who the customer is. So it's like,

this is a problem, but it's like, hey, this is our clear customer. This clearly solves a problem for them. We know it's for them and we're going to go creative for them. But sometimes it's like, hey, this is a problem that a lot of people struggle with. And then we have to go and test into these things and kind of find the product market fit a little bit.

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“just seeing the homepage now. The only thing now, again, the packaging still skews female. So”

that mode may be like to turn me a little bit. Like when any time, I think especially with just

like how many supplements there are out there and how many supplement brands there are out there, I mean me personally and maybe I'm a little like health-pilled on this stuff, but like I really care about ingredients and like I want to see the laundry list of ingredients and I want to know what's in it, what it does. And I also, the other thing I really like about your new home page is I feel like you've you've taken the ingredient angle from or you've you've you're approaching

ingredients from two different angles. Like you have the how-wings helps you sleep better, and like how you're connecting an outcome to the ingredient. Like cornstress is connected to Ashwaganda, Afron is connected to sleep quality. And then you have more of the just like straight-up objective ingredient with the pop-outs. Like I think that's a, that's a cool, I think that's like a really smart way to hit it from from both angles like outcome-based and like here's which ingredient

gives you which outcome. And then you just have more like the straight-up science, like here's the

“ingredient, here's why it's in winks. Here's the research on it. Like I think that's a really”

smart way to go like you're hitting it from both angles. And I think different people are going to care about it. Like some people just want the list and like the scientific information and some people are like, I don't want to go all like nerdy on the science. I just want to know that Ashwaganda comes stress and and great. I'm stressed out. So like I'm now interested in this product. I appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate that. Because I don't want to take too long so I want to make

sure you guys get yours. But yeah, I agree. And like I again, we don't know, but I same thing like I like the product. I think the product is really good. It helps my sleep. Like I don't necessarily like, I wouldn't be drawn to the packaging. I wouldn't be drawn to, you know, the branding. So I think once we determine who the customer is, like I'm sure that'll change. And if you look a lot like everyone's shared that like agey one, you know, screenshot of like what their

initial branding was. Like they've had like three or four over the years. Like it is a very standard thing to do. Obviously like maybe we missed more than we should have, but it is a standard thing to do. All right. So two things that we're working well. Partnership ads. I'll share one, right.

“And you know, one thing that I think anybody could do in my so here's one and we'll link it.”

I'm sure team will link it and everything. But you know, partnership ads. I think they're great for everybody, but initial stages because you do get a little bit of targeting signal to meta. Right. You do get a little bit credibility. A lot of people have told me in the initial phases that can lower CPMs. Right. But then you just get the credibility. And then I'll show you like the lander that we built. You know, and it's just a great way to kind of test

and like see how they're going to save them. So, you know, it's really just a standard kind of,

you know, UGC video was posted as an IG story, you know, initially. You know, and I won't play it with like sound and stuff like that right now, but it's just kind of talking through it, giving, you know, the main talking point. I can share our brief as well. And then it's going, we tested it initially to a PDP. It did pretty well. And then work to spin up this this lander.

“You know, and I think in the early stages, it's something where now we have”

so few partners because we're not spending that much that we can probably build a lander for everyone. And now we have a template. And so I spent, I built this over the weekend, you know, took like a day and a half, just like, you know, various, as I had time of the weekend.

And now we have a template done. And so we can just have a skill and clutter codex where it's

like our cool. Read, watch this video, pull out the top points, screenshot images from it, you know, put it there. And so this is how it performs a little bit as well. So actually one question here, before we get too far into it. Um, on the ad, we were looking at this woman very raw. She's sitting in our living room. She's holding the wings bag. She's talking about it. We've opened up the lander now. You've got her name here. Learn how wings helps Ellen Kim get the best

loop of her life. We've got her feature again. Is she, I saw people discuss this on X recently? Is she a known creator in any way? Or are you just like, she's got like 450,000 followers. So she's not like a celeb, um, but I, but there's some kind of ability there. Yeah, I would say, our, our, our rule of Jones Road. We probably didn't personalize the landers unless they had like a million followers, but you know, we're testing like 10, 20 partners a week. Um, so it's just,

you know, harder to do. Um, and not always worth the uplift, but right, I have seen it even like

150,000 followers. I have seen it work. And, you know, we had to add that was fitting going to like a PDP or a different page. And we built, you know, five reasons why with that creator in it. I'm like, just totally turn around performance. So even smaller, what I do it for somebody that size or 50k, very unlikely. Um, but I don't think they have to be like a Tony Hawk celebrity to, you know, to benefit from it. But then also, I mean, I feel like a big part of just the wings thesis

generally is that with AI and great templates and processes, like you can just do much more than you could in the past, that theoretically, like if Jones Road used to do it for people with a million followers, like you could totally justify doing it for your top 40 creators no better who they are, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, what took the time on this page was was the, was really the design and development of it. And so now that that's done, um, I could build a

skill and, you know, very likely have have codex or runeth, you know, watch the video, pull out the top points, do the five reasons, like yeah, totally agree with that. So all, all let you know the next time I, you know, build a page, which will be this week or next week. Um, it should be, you know, near matter of minutes. So yeah, I agree with that. Um, and I'll just walk through the template a little bit. Um, obviously, you know, all the basic stuff like social proof got to be very skimble,

have the creator's picture above the fold. Obviously, have your social proof and offer above the

“fold, um, you know, bullets. I think we could have some bolding and that to make it a little bit better,”

have, you know, a benefit you haven't have headline, but mentioning the creator's name, um, you know, her videos in here for people. I want to do it. Little five reasons why section, social proof. Uh, I saw this on another page. I kind of picked it up, designed them so they kind of look like Facebook. Uh, the other ones that I have on the PDP have, um, actually had like comments and like, Son, then I got to add those back. But, you know, just a, just a little hack to kind of. And if you

can even like screenshot from stuff from Facebook, like even better, um, wherever the traffic sources, that's a great one. Use X ducks a big proponent of that with, uh, a lot of the hollow socks landing pages, like heavily feature comments from meta, just because like it feels, I think there's, it feels more realistic. It feels more authentic than just like the sort of generic poll quotes that people often do. For sure, because it's harder to fake. Yeah. Anything that is like harder to

“that the brand can't fake. So yeah. Um, and I think these even could be more real. We just don't have”

the actual ones on Facebook, but if I did it would. I like that you, I like that you put someone as an anonymous. That feels, uh, again, that just feels like I'd rather have it be named. I kind of, I mean, like honestly, I kind of like it because I think some, some people are like super weird about having their name out there. So I could see, like, honestly, to me, it feels more real that one out of four people would be like, actually, can you just like not put my name up there? Like, I feel weird about that.

It actually feels like more legitimate. Interesting. Um, so, you know, we go by box offer. So this is kind of offer that we're testing and going with by ones. See, if 35% by two get one free,

the home page as well. Yeah. Yep. So I've obviously in the future, we can have different ones and tests them, but right now, just going with that, because like the offer wasn't the main variable here. In no sub. Uh, sub. Oh, this is both sub. Let's, uh, yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, yep. Um, you know, this same section again. So like a lot of these sections are just kind of reusable, you know, reviews, social proof. So a lot of the, a lot of the standard stuff. Um, again, it's not like,

“what is, what is reviews looking like right now, Cody, like, I think that's such a”

important part for any new brand is like getting legitimate reviews. Um, and like, are you guys doing things to help streamline that more than, like, I, I, I go once you get going, right? Like you set

up like cycle marketing and that kind of kept get reviews coming in and it always on way. But are you

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revenue forecast, put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts. Yeah, that's a really good question and conner from Q4. If you guys did anything, because it's tough. Obviously, we did a lot early sampling to people and got some reviews for over launch, but we still have probably 27. It's tough because with a judgeme or something like that,

“it does have to be a verified customer. Otherwise, it'll just say this was gifted and I think”

it's better to have verified. Some of it is just naturally having them come in. But I think just in general, the more social proof, Zack stuck has on Marsmen. They have so many great photo before an afters. They just have so much great social proof. And so I'm trying to think like what is one of ours? Because I think that's one where you just want to flood the zone with social proof. And if you look at a lot of these D-R brands are doing well, like a primal queen or something like that,

just loads of social proof and like in various different forms. So I think for awesome, I'm probably going to like images of sleep scores and like somebody on X yesterday tagged me in one and I'm just like, "Hey, can I use that?" You know, and maybe we'll do a challenge or figure out like in a life cycle flow. How do we request these things and incentivize people to generate them? So I'm all for ideas, but that's I think a little bit of the challenge right now and we're trying

to do more. We'll have great work right now, like we posted in our Discord, have creators do some videos on site, you know? Yeah, all any ideas kind of or anything that you've done that has work? I was in, I think the aura stuff is really interesting. I think that's a fun, a fun way to like show the before and after because it's not like, I don't know, you can't like really visualize it with someone. I don't know, maybe you could show like someone looking

refreshed versus groggy, but that just feels a little like facilitated to me. I think the aura, like, here's the, here's my average aura sleep score before trying wings and look at it now. It's gone up by 20 points on average. I think that's a cool angle. I like that too, you know, I really like, um, mode water. I don't mean to be this such a faux paw. I'm going to talk about another sleep beverage that I have before bed. But mode water has a great like rest formula,

and I was talking to their team about it. And like my big, the first few times I tried it,

I got like 90 sleep scores. And I'm like, oh, this feels, it's so hard to like quantify sleep. And like the way you feel in the morning is affected by so many different things, um, that like the score is a great way. It felt very validated into me in the case of rest. Again, this was months ago, pre-winks. So, um, I've got, I'll change my allegiance. But, um, but that was, that was really big for me. The only thing would be, that's a really discerning customer. I don't think you're

necessarily selling people selling two people, or I think it will be much more difficult if you're selling to people who really care about their sleep scores. It might be great like validation, just to convince the average tired mom to like be converting on the product. Because to Connor's point, I don't know how I'll see show that before and after. Although, I'll say one other thing, the image of like someone groggy versus someone refreshed does feel a little contrived.

“But I think it works. I think like, I think we have to be, at least certain funnels you have to be”

thinking about the median consumer when you're advertising. This came up on X again recently.

they said, you know, if consumers don't like this, then why do we do it? And like what every brand will tell you that the data says, that is the time someone's most likely to purchase. And the

best thing you can do for your brand is try to get them to create that second order. Almost immediately

for us, it's like, it's within the first like seven days of the first order. Before they even receive their their first order, um, we're often trying to drive that second one. So I just think like, we also have to take a step back and make the distinction that like our preferences are not like the median consumer's preferences. Just the amount of time we spend on websites and like thinking about marketing. And I do think the like just heavy handed tired man versus like rested man is an image

that could like really, really crush. I wouldn't write any of that stuff all held off on the sleep score because like Matt really want to do like a better sleep guarantee and stuff. And I was like, I don't know. And this is a part of like trying to figure out our persona. But like, I don't know that

our customer is like a, a human man optimization. Like, I don't even know that their tracking

“sleep scores are wearing an aura. So I think that'll be interesting and obviously will depend on it.”

But I totally agree with the point of like, like, playing to the middle persona and can the sleep scores simply serve the purpose of showing the before and after that might like appeal to the median consumer. I was just gonna say, and I think that's a good point. Um, and I kind of meant to about Marsmen like having different ways to show social proof. It's like, it's not just one and reviews, but there's a bunch of different ways and there's, there's, there's video, there's,

right, there's press, there's your actual reviews like there's the before and after. It's like, you can just flood the zone and have different ways because one, I might care about one and you might care about a different way a little bit more. Yeah. I've got one other question for you, Cody, as we like go through the whole site, you know, Taylor holiday had a great podcast recently about it was with Andrew Ferris about how difficult supplements have become and one of his reasons is because

there's nothing defensible about claims. Um, so like you brought up this point like better sleep guaranteed. In like, you know, I don't know the legal implications of that or what that actually means or whether it can be quantified and our people, you know, expecting their dollars to be returned if they're not actually sitting better. Um, it does feel like the supplement space is just so aggressive with claims right now that it is like a race to the bottom of claims and that's like

one of the reasons it's become such a PVP saturated like difficult market. I think to launch in today. It's got great economic, but there's a lot of people being really aggressive with user acquisition that often comes down to claims. So I'm curious, well, you guys, it feels like you guys are very tempered in your approach to like speaking about the value and do you see that changing over time or are there going to be touch points like throughout the different funnels where you'll lean

into it further because I feel like that's like you're you're sitting on a lot of opportunity there potentially. We probably will. I don't think we'll take it as far as do and I think building it

“publicly makes that, you know, makes you have to do it, you know, white hat. So I think we can”

we will make claims that we know are compliant and legal. But, you know, for example, we do have three clinically studied ingredients and so we can make claims because of that we can make claims for those ingredients. We can't say "winks" has fixed this or "winks" has, you know, fixed fixes this. We you have to say supports, but you can we can say these ingredients have been shown to fix this. We do that. Everything else otherwise has to be a support. But if you look at like

risads or something like that, like there's a lot of like if you watch closely like they say supports. Like they they're very aggressive with claims, but they're not saying this fixes it or it cares. Like that's what can get you in hot water. It's hey, if you have this problem, if you have this bloating problem or whatever, this is a fix and then they kind of like agitate it hard and then it's, you know, then it's hey, rises supports this. So you kind of there's like a little bit of a gray area where

you can get it and so we will definitely play around with a lot more of that and I think we will need to to be successful. I totally agree. I think we're too soft and watered down right now. Yeah, 100% and I've said not I'm not advocating for any sort of like real gray or black cat behavior

here, never on the marketing operators podcast. But but there is there is more to be done there for

sure in a very legally compliant way. It's all the points you just mentioned. So excited to see you guys experiment with that further because I just think there's there's some meat on the bone. Well, in some of that is even like, and I don't think we'll do now, but like paying for an investing in like clinical studies, like at Jones Road, all kind of like every product

“lunch now we do that is because that's what allows you to make these claims and even even at”

Jones Road if we want to say eight hour wear or you know fixes help dark circles or stuff like that. Like you do a consumer test and you pay 10 grand and if it works out now you're, you're all able to do this stuff totally. You know the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them,

noise. You got platform data. You got blended data, MMM, all the acronyms, MTA experiments,

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“the more the bad signal can cost you. That's why we use house and we've been using it for years.”

That's why the other marketing operators do as well. They're the best tool on plan earth for measuring what we call incrementality, which we talk about a lot on a podcast. What is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business? We have causal MMM for channel level budget calls, causal attribution down to the ad level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. And the results speak for themselves. Stockhick saw a 41% lift in Iroce using

house and you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement strategy to actual help strategic better decisions. Their whole team is great. We've worked with a lot of them. They are world-class there. Go to house.io/operators. H-a-u-s.io/operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data. Well, sweet. We want to call it a rap on Wings and talk the egg pan funnel from Hexclad. All right. Yes, so we've talked about this before, but one of the

new acquisition wedges we found success with this year is this new category of products that we initially launched in Japan and some of our other international markets and had some decent success with these products with our retention audiences. And then when we launched these in our paid accounts about three months ago, they've really been one of our top new funnels that we've launched and it's been really exciting for us. And it has really just shifted a lot of how we're thinking

about promoting more products in our ad accounts. So yeah, I'll share my screen. I can run through

some of the creative here, then kind of go through, go through overseeing. So first off, in terms of

ad creative, we had a really awesome stack for launch. So we had like three different creators that we activated with, you know, doing a mixture of pure white listing, which is what we're seeing here, partnership ads and running these right from the brand page. Funny enough, like the pure white listing is what's what's working the best out of the gate here. This has been our ad that scaled the best. And then we also have a bunch of static ads. This is just one example, like

product focused, you know, I guess you could call it a lifestyle image with the flowers in the background.

“A few things here that I think make this ad really awesome. One is like we've never”

activated with Japanese creators before in our US ad accounts. So like right there, we're reaching a totally new audience and I can share some data on that. And we're just building a ton of trust, right? Like we don't have, it's a Japanese person talking about these these Japanese products and there's a ton of trust baked in there. And then the other thing, as far as like format goes, it was like opening with product and then following up with use cases and outcomes. And I think

that she did a really nice job with that with both of these products. So that's kind of the format of this ad. And then we, we move on to some of the other creative that we have supporting this. We've a bunch of like lifestyle product-focused static images like this. Again, really leaning into like the Japanese origins. And then another thing that we're that we're pretty much doing with all new products is like just a really beautifully shot what we call like our high-fi high-prails,

which really sells just the premium nature of this. So I'll play this one as well. And this is one that we, you know, we shoot this type of content for pretty much every single new product we launch. One of my questions actually before we get like too far into this. Um, because we think about this a lot at Ridge. The ad we just watched seemed to heavily focus on the rice cooker early on. And then it did a really good job of hitting the egg pan afterwards. So I'm curious how often are those things

bought together? And then how are you thinking about ad creative that supports each or both of those?

The second ad that we looked at was just the egg pan in like that really elevated static image.

I don't know what we're going to look at here, but like how often are they advertised together, how often are they advertised separately? How do people buy that? And then how does that inform like the ad creative that you're building in the way you set up the accounts? Yeah. You know, we really, we really just wanted to have a mix. Um, and I think the reason we wanted to have a mix and and I actually think this is still generally, um, kind of a slept on like

reality in the ad account is that it's not like people are seeing one ad and going to the site and then like that's it. Right. That's the journey. Our frequency since we launched these ads is a four and a half on all of our, our egg pan in rice pot. So on average, someone is seeing four to five

“ads. Um, when they're in this funnel and like that's why we just wanted to have breath. We wanted”

people. We wanted some people only focusing on one. We wanted some others focusing on both of them. And what we're seeing is that, and I'll get into this in a little bit here, but like the price point for both of these products is $130 USD, our AOV and North Beam on these is like 2017 and on average one and four or a little bit higher than that. It's like 27% of people are buying both of these

into the, the landing page experience to kind of run through why that is. And then that's not even

“including people that are coming in and buying like an additional product as well. And you'll see”

on the product page like we are really selling the cookware technology as a whole. So it also makes sense that we're seeing some spill over. But yeah, we really just wanted to want to breath more than anything. And again, there's like three different creators, all with different ads showing different products. And then again, good breath of statics. And then we have our our hype real here, which I'll play now. So quick, fun, punchy, like music's good. I saw you popping your head.

Like it's it's like short and sweet to the point. This one's definitely more like value properly named early on. But it still hits on the outcomes here. And again, all of these I've just like created this very robust funnel where we have a bunch of different messages, asset types, and some are a little bit more outcome focused, leaning into certain products more than others. And then some are a little bit more like product value prop focused. So we have, you know, this,

this very robust funnel now kind of just hitting people from different different angles from the brand from creators. And it's just creating this like really nice ecosystem of ads. All right, this ad is technically a job posting for Neon Pixel. But but stay with me here. Neon Pixel is hiring performance marketers. People who actually get incrementality. They understand hold out the understand triangulation. And really that's the entire pitch because when you sign

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funnel on a specific set of products. We are promoting a product we've never promoted before.

We are activating with an entirely new batch of creators that we've never activated for. So this has a 98% new website visitor percentage. That's like insanely high. We never see like we are always we don't have like a lot of the net new visit percentage. Well, is that some brands have. But like it will get as low as like 60% mid 50s at times depending on the time of the year. So this is like really activated an incremental audience for us through all those those things that

that I just mentioned. And really the the message that gets them interested is like

“number one best seller in Japan. Like that's what that creator opened up with. Now it's”

brought to the state. It's like we're really leaning into the social proof from the sense of hey, these are Japanese products that are selling incredibly well in Japan, which is true. Those are our hero products in our Japanese market. And there's just like so much inherent trust when that's the hook. And then you have a Japanese creator giving that hook. Like I think it really very quickly, you know, it's trust, trust, trust is what I wrote in my notes here.

Like it really quickly builds that trust. And then moving on to the the the landing page, which for us is just a product page. Like we we might we probably will develop a landing page to try to continue to scale this further. But like we've just been able to scale it early on without without too much fatigue. So we're like continuing to lean in here. But what I like about this experience is again, we're leaning into like the Japanese social proof in the ad creative

really heavily. And then the first thing right under the product name is our reviews. And this is a

sticky link down here where we have, you know, a 4.89 out of five star review on 103 reviews with a bunch of fresh ones, right? 17 hours, six days, eight days, eight days, 15 days. Like clearly people are actively buying this and leaving reviews. So we're starting off with like the brand and creator led social proof. And then we we hit the website and the very first thing someone can click is this reviews link. And boom, now we're hitting them with social proof from our actual

“customer. So I think we're like just building a ton of trust early on in this funnel.”

Then going down again right away. The first thing we say in the product description is already a best seller in Japan. This evolution of a traditional Tokyo style, Tomo Goaki Pan, Yadiyada Yadiyada. So again, just like that narrative is very cohesive. And then we're getting

into like our always on kind of evergreen cookware technology, right? Like the hybrid technology,

warranty. Same thing here. This is all like I think at some point we'll probably want to do a custom technology section here. But really then leaning into the just the evergreen kind of product page social proof that we have, you know, we've really nice, you know, product type real right before our additional social proof sections here. So that is the the destination that we're driving to. Let me find my notes. You know, one thing I want to talk about quickly, because this is why

asked about how you guys are thinking about the egg pan versus the rice cooker or the rice pan. We think about the rice time and the rice pot. Thank you.

I just want to call out that a 27% take rate basically on this upsell is crazy high.

“Yeah, 100 in $9. That's what we're thinking about all the time. And it's a little bit different”

for supplements, right? Supplements are like, okay, I mean, there are optimizations to make in driving up initial order value, but like a lot of the value you're going to get from a customer is like, you know, from a retention perspective, like you're going to get it over three, four, five, six months. For brands like hexclad and rigid, it's like we need to be getting value today. And so properly seeing that up at the ad level across like a bunch of beautiful creative

and then driving into a page where super simple to add that to the point that 27% of people are adding it. I think it's just like one of those things. It's the it's the flow that we try to create across

all of our categories. Like when you think about what is the number one upsell to the wallet,

what's the number one upsell to the power bank to the carry on? It's just like that extra little thing and then how do you pull that all the way through from the ad level to the PDP to, you know, we'll still continue to try to sell it in like post-purchase upsell. So I just think for me that's what really sticks out is like a very nice integration of the complimentary products. Yeah, yeah, 100% and like that was the whole goal right out of the gate here was like how do we get as high

of an attach rate as possible? And it's like, we'll sell them on both products out of the gate. Don't only one of the products in the collection and that take rates going to be way better. You know, I think what's what's going to be really fun for our retention team is we move into the end of this year and end of 2027 is like we are acquiring now more and more people on products like this that aren't the $700 12 piece set. So I think where we need to take our retention program

is really start to treat these segments of, you know, basically cohorting people based on the first

products they've ordered, running market basket analyses, running second, third, fourth order analyses to see what are the products that someone at buys? These two products in their first time order most likely to buy next and then building like specific experiences for those people. Like I

“think that's how we, you know, we, I think for us to continue driving growth in lifetime value”

comes from treating our cohort more personally and just having more experience that a personal based on the first time order product that they bought. So again, for us here, like there is no offer on the, I mean, the, I shouldn't say there's no offer. Obviously, the entire experience is the offer, but like there's no discount on our price point. However, this price is much much lower than our best selling, like super highly die site sets, right? And it's, it's like very easy to go and like

click around on our website and see the products that we're, we're promoting the most, right? It's our 12 piece set, our six piece set. So even though there is no, there's no offer on on this as in terms of like discount, it's just a lot easier wedge into the brand, especially when you compare it to all the different skews that we are merchandising more prominently. And then of course, we do have this $30 off offer on the, the complimentary product, same thing. If you have

the, the rice pot selected, it's the same price offer on the egg pan. So, um, and that is really

“I think what's driving that it's a combination of like that, that cross-sell offer, plus the education”

we're doing in the ad creative that is driving that, you know, 27% take rate on this, on this upsell, 27% of people buying one of them are buying both of them. Most brands treat customer support as a cost, but with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue and grow your LTD. Rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets, they allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different windback offers

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egg pan, do I land on this PDP or is this a paid specific PDP? No, you would land on this. This is just a product. Yeah, this is just a regular product page here. Yeah. You know what's interesting? I don't know how I feel about this personally. Another thing that we've thought about a lot,

perspective, where it's like, oh yeah, I don't feel like this is like a variant. I'm on. I'm

shopping the Japanese egg pan. I didn't expect to be able to switch to the rice pot right there. I get that these are a collection so that it makes sense that people are shopping between them consistently, but that's something that we don't do currently. Yeah, we don't do that currently,

“and I think it's interesting. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but we've always landed on the”

other side of like once you're on a PDP like this, like you were shopping that PDP, we can push you into bundles and upsells, but like we wouldn't navigate someone. We would have it as like a you may also like section. Make it really clear like, hey, this is going to be another thing now where I think intuitively, at least in my mind, I think of these like variant selectors as like just selecting variations of the thing that I'm looking at and not navigating to like a net new product.

Yep, and this is like, that's a good point because this is very, like this is the exception, not the, not the regular setup for us. Like if you were to go to most of our, maybe all of our product pages, all of our selectors are mainly variants. It's like you're on the the pan's for the pan's page and it's like eight, like seven, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. This one because we do not have a landing page that merchandise them together, we're going right to the

product page and because we're educating folks and explaining both products, we decided to add this selector. So it was all in the same experience. The other thing that we're talking about and we'll probably do a test on at some point is what's going to perform better. Is it actually

“having the cross sell right here with the offer or is it simply to have a third variant here?”

That's like egg pan-rice pot bundle and then there's a discount baked into the overall price. I don't know, we haven't tested it, this is working well, so we've decided to just seal it as is. But I think that's probably a future test that will run is like this experience versus maybe removing this or not or we just keep it and it's still there when you have the individual selected but some people might prefer just like buy the bundle without having to click this,

this extra select button and to get both of them in the cart. So like that's probably a future a future test here and then, you know, one of the, one of the questions in the brief from Mike was like, what happens if if someone leaves without buying? Again, I want to go back to the point that four and a half frequency on on these ads. It's not like someone's only seeing the

UGC ad and never seeing anything out. So like we have, I don't know, probably 10 unique creatives in

this funnel. So people are seeing a lot of those which I think is absolutely helping the performance here. We're hitting them with different styles of assets, different messages, multiple creators and I just think that's so important. Like we always have our, you know, we call this like a B tier launch and like we always have our like content buckets that we're going in producing against like we're always doing the hyper real. We're always doing product and lifestyle statics with text overlays. We

“are always doing creator let ads. Like that is those are the buckets we're always filling and I think”

it's really important when you look at the frequencies on some of these funnels. And then also, of course, you know, we have all sorts of browse and like abandonment flow is happening in email. You know, we are like fully seeing massive lists with shopper right now relative compared to our static life cycle marketing in SMS marketing. So obviously people are like getting pushed into the the shopper experience as well if they if they browse and they don't convert. And then just in

terms like results and what we're learning early on, like I think I wanted to just briefly hit on like why are we saying this is a winner? Like what data points are we seeing? So I'm seeing it in like two different phases. One is just creative testing, right? Like when we launched this in our creative testing campaign, this had like like not even a small, not even a 10% marginal bump against all of creative testing. It was like way, way, way higher than our entire creative testing

road return on ad spend. So like right away, we saw that efficiency signal is like,

all right, we're on to something here. That was the first kind of like box we checked that we're

saying this is a winner. Then over time, we've we've put more and more budget into it. We've spent multiple six figures behind this funnel. And now we're looking at it a little bit different. They were saying, hey, now is we're scaling it more, which is like a success metric in and of itself. But how does that efficiency compare to other scale campaigns? Same thing. As we were putting six figures that's been behind this, we were able to maintain a strong row as compared to the scale

benchmarks. Now, did it stay where it was in creative testing? No, of course not. As you scale things, efficiency comes down. But the benchmark changes, now we're saying, hey, how does this scaled funnel compared to other scale funnels? And we were happy with the efficiency we saw relative to the other scale funnels. And then last but not least, huge lift in net revenue on these products since we launched this campaign. So we're looking at period over period since we launched this,

what's the lift in units and net revenue in these two products specifically? And then we're backing into like an incremental return on atspan. Like what's the difference in net revenue divided about the total atspan? That's a very like vacuum type analysis. Like this is also

of these two products and looking at the IRO as it's also a profitable, profitable funnel with

the unit economics are working there. So those are kind of like the the three ways we're looking at it

“is like, how's it looking in creative testing? Have you ever had to other creative tests?”

Then as we scale it, how's it looking to other, you know, scaled campaigns and adds efficiency? And then as we also scale, what kind of lift are we seeing just in terms of like blended incremental return on atspan for these for this product funnel specifically? And like all three those are looking really strong and giving us confidence to like continually and in here. All right, we only have a couple of minutes. I do want to make one quick point. And this might be

interesting for you guys to look at one of the things that we've found with like new products and specifically new colorways that you know, like I would imagine a lot of people are clicking on the Eggpan ads coming through and purchasing the 12th piece set. I don't know if a lot is the right word, but it's it's awesome. Yeah, for sure. So then we and I've mentioned this on the podcast months ago, but like if you fully wait like if you were to say, hey, I want to look

at Japanese Eggpan sales and the rice pot sales over all of the that ad spend for those products, like it might be an overly conservative way to look at it. We end up having a much lower like quote unquote M.E.R. Target on a on like a specific product basis because we know that a lot of revenues being captured elsewhere. So for instance, we run, let's call it a two and a half x M.E.R. our target M.E.R. in an individual product. I shouldn't even say target. Our best launches are like a

one point eight. You'd actually expect that they might be a higher M.E.R. that they might actually be more efficient, but that's they are technically more efficient and the incremental rose on the ad spend is higher, but that's just because so much of the revenues captured outside of like the specific products that we'd be including in the numerator. So it might be an interesting way for you guys to look at it as well. Yeah. And that's why like whenever I'm working at that third like

met measurement model, like just like the blended performance of the business, it's like that

is always the like it's a super conservative way to look at it. Like I'm looking at our our

scaled campaign, egg pan and rice pot right now, and we have like custom L of R events set up. So we can go see what other products people are buying. And like we sold 48 griddles from this. We've sold 52 12 piece sets, 35, 6 piece sets, 16 knives, 8 barbecue pan. There's all sorts of other orders happening here that we're not even considering in the blended business unit analysis here. So I think yeah, 100% like that that I row as our calculating is the absolute like

most conservative way to look at it that you that you possibly could for sure. People are the most important part of your business and finding real a players is hard and

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So I've got one last thing I'd be curious to your guys as perspective on. Like if we were going to generalize funnel-building advice for people. We've all, you guys talked about very specific examples for Winks and Hexclad. If there was going to be generalized advice for people who want to turn around, look at their brand and maybe like improve or build out some of their funnels initially. Like what might we say? So I guess one of mine and I hit it hard

with the Hexclad example would be just thinking about the complimentary products. Do you have a hero product like the Japanese Eggpan? What are you most often selling alongside that? Make sure that's advertising ads on the landing page. Easy upsell opportunities. You can be value-oriented there, which I think is cool. I think that sort of thing can go a really long way and can be applied across a lot of other businesses. I think for me the biggest thing, at least, if you think about it

from like top of funnel to the beginning of funnel, top of funnel being the ads, middle of funnel being the land or destination bottom being the conversion point. Again, these ads do not exist into vacuum. I think too many brands are like, "Oh, we made one ad around this product and it didn't work well." So we're going to write that off. It might have worked if you had 10 different ads, right? Because they all do, they are additive. They work together. People are seeing multiple

“ads. You've got to have different asset types. You've got to have different angles. You have to have”

different value-props and creators. These funnels work to get these ads work together. They don't

swing. I think is the first point I would make. And then as far as destinations go, you don't need to necessarily have a landing page to test with. Like start with what you have. If performance

“is good, they're a great scale it. If conversion rates bad, I think that's the signal to go”

and maybe if you have a really high output and click to rate and good engagement on the ad, but conversion rates are not there. Okay, well then maybe you have a destination as you go

try to create a landing page. But I always like to start with just a really strong breadth of

creative. I also think this is our existing technology, right? We're not. This isn't a totally new category that I have to really educate someone on. So I think that also is a reason the product page is probably working better here. But I would start with those those points. The other one I would add, we did this. We're trying to rapidly increase the rate at which we're developing landing pages. So we're trying to find more reasons to have a landing page. Or like uncover

why we might build out a new destination for people. And one of the things that we did was we just began grouping our ads by like winning concepts. And so Brunnith does this really well.

“Runnith was a part of like this exercise where it's like let's, let's group these things further”

to figure out what are the value props of the problem and solution messaging that like a few of our winners have in common. We started there and then we did and this has just become so infinitely easier with AI. But then we did a comment analysis. So we looked at all of those ads and what are people commenting about? What do people have questions on? And we obviously did a review analysis. And so those three things was really like, if I like we were looking at our ads with really

fresh eyes. Like when we go through all of our funnels, there's a very sort of subjective lens that we put them through which is valuable. And like there's a lot that can come from that. But we found it to be a very helpful exercise to have like a more objective view of what are people saying? Like let's group these ads. And even that like removing the subjectivity from that or at least allowing a third party tool like runnith to do it. I thought was helpful.

“Identified sort of like new concepts or dimensions of messaging like we maybe weren't thinking”

about. And then the very objective nature of like what are people actually commenting and reviewing about this product? And that has sparked the number of ideas for us to continue iterating and launching either new ads or continuing to build new landing pages. So I'll throw that one in there as well. It's just like further retrospectives. But I do think like to go back to what you were talking about related to our funnel and like just like the merchandising stuff. I do think generally people

underindex the cross-selling, up-selling post-purchase experience. And everyone's like how do we how do we find the next winning ad or the next like you know 5% lifting, conversion rate or 5% drop in cacts through a landing page. But like often like you're if you find a winning funnel like it's often way better to think through like what's the how do we extract another 50 to a hundred dollars out of this person through email and SMS or like on-site post-purchase experiences. And

like you know it's it's always like a size of the prize kind of analysis here to decide where you

where you focus. But like for us like we you know if you were to look if you were to bucket our our first time orders by average order value if you were to sell like 0 to 200, 200 to 400, 400, 400 to 600 and so on. And then to look like 12 month reorder rates like if they're inversely related right like the lower the first order is not now not they don't necessarily back out to overall LTV but when I look at the the when I know that and then I'm looking at the AOV on the funnel

it's 217 dollars which is like well below are our blended first order AOV. To me the obvious place to actually go and optimize is like we know these people are likely to reorder out of higher clip like let's go give them the opportunity to do so in a data driven way versus let's go source the next UGC at well why we already have four that are performing well like let's go extract more value out of these people that are already coming in at a really

efficient you know ad in cack and all those things so yeah I just think like there's new ones here

and where you go to go decide to optimize the next part of the funnel it's not always the next

ad or the or the landing page totally and maybe the way that I would generalize at it's just like really taking a high level view of the economics of your funnel and it's like where can you improve it and rather than saying oh my god I need to like just convert people with more more landing pages or I need lower and lower CPMs or higher and higher click through rates so you could it could be as simple as saying hey I'm only getting for ridge we we're like scaling up this $30

tracker card funnel and the best place that we can create value might not be conversion rate we're not going to get people to convert it 12% but can we get a 150% lift in the first three months it's like that super super possible so um all right I like that one as well so we've got some generalized takeaways I like this super fun breaking down the funnels with you guys I see we call that an episode yeah this is fun we should do some more screen share stuff like this 100% all right we'll see you all next week